‘Manic Nirvana’: How Robert Plant Reconnected With Hard-Rock’s Highs

“Everybody is writing and contributing to the songs. I need these guys!”

The “company” Plant kept was the young, highly talented and explosive band he’d put together for Now And Zen, and whose services he retained for Manic Nirvana. The singer’s charges included guitarist Doug Boyle, keyboardist and co-producer Phil Johnstone, bassist Charlie Jones and drummer Chris Blackwell – and Plant was swift to sing their praises.

“I’m the boss because of my experience, but I’m not a dictatorial egotist,” he told US music writer Greg Kot in May 1990. “Everybody is writing and contributing to the songs. I need these guys!”

Manic Nirvana’s songwriting credits do indeed reveal that Plant’s entire band were throwing ideas into the pot – and many of them were gloriously realised contenders among the best Robert Plant solo songs. Released on 19 March 1990, the album included some of the singer’s loudest and horniest rockers in years – not least the pulverising Nirvana, the Woodstock-referencing Tie Dye On The Highway and the grinding Big Love, which Plant wrote in response to Aerosmith’s similarly innuendo-laden Love In An Elevator. Yet, while the music was rarely less than incendiary, fans were particularly thrilled to hear Plant in such vintage vocal form.

“I’ve revisited some of the areas that I used to live in – high screams and stuff like that”

“I’m more at home with the whole style of the thing,” he explained in a 1990 MTV interview. “So I’ve revisited some of the areas vocally that I used to live in before, you know, using high screams and stuff like that.

“It’s totally inappropriate to use them just for the hell of it,” he continued. “You can only use the high register and that kind of long wail thing if you’ve got a piece of music that demands it, or asks for it. And these songs are definitely in that area.”

Yet, in the same way that most of Led Zeppelin’s key releases paraded a broad array of styles, Manic Nirvana had designs on more than simply getting its rocks off. It also offered enticing fare ranging from the densely layered, world-music-tinged Watching You to the soaring ballad I Cried and the James Brown-style groove of S S S & Q. Arguably the record’s highest point, though, was a spectacular cover of Kenny Dino’s 1961 US hit, Your Ma Said You Cried In Your Sleep Last Night, which fused the original’s doo-wop strains with slashing guitars and hip-hop beats, and emerged sounding utterly unique.

“I’m still wandering on the edge, just like Led Zeppelin did”

With fans thrilled by its breadth of material, Manic Nirvana made a robust showing on the charts. It arguably benefitted from coinciding with grunge’s steady rise in the US, but the album still won a clutch of positive reviews under its own steam, with Classic Rock astutely suggesting, “If Led Zeppelin had attempted to make a pop-oriented album, it may have sounded like Manic Nirvana.”

Those reviews translated to sales, as the album peaked inside the Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic and went gold in the US. Yet despite its success, Plant had little desire to make another record in a similar vein. Manic Nirvana had afforded him the opportunity to acknowledge his past in style, but once he’d achieved that, he made a rapid stylistic volte-face and returned with 1993’s Fate Of Nations: a sombre, reflective record featuring Irish folk star Moya Brennan.

“We probably meander a bit too much to ever appeal to mainstream tastes… I’m still wandering on the edge, just like Led Zeppelin did,” Plant told the Chicago Tribune when Manic Nirvana was released.

“My personality, my identity on this planet are linked inextricably with my enthusiasm for what I do, so I’ve got to make it new every time. Commercial success is secondary. It’s much more thrilling to do it this way, and be appreciated by those who get the plot.”

Buy Robert Plant vinyl and box sets at the Dig! store.